


Magic of No Place

by fire_is_my_happy_place



Series: Myth Shorts [6]
Category: Fairy Tales & Related Fandoms
Genre: Other, attending a magic school, but not fuzzy or nice
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-20
Updated: 2016-05-20
Packaged: 2018-06-09 14:46:27
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 632
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6911476
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fire_is_my_happy_place/pseuds/fire_is_my_happy_place
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>An introduction to life at the academy for the magics of no place.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Magic of No Place

> There are only two types of magic available to human magicians: the magic of place, and the magic of transition. All other types are either subsets of those or magics that humans may not bear. The first is more common than people know—to live in a fixed home, to make a place your own—because it seems so ordinary to them. They imbue possessions with mana, haunt their homes like strangely unsubtle ghosts, and change the nature of the world around them inside a limited, strict domain.
> 
> The second, however, is a rare thing, and is a gift only given to those who are willing to abandon a place and the magical transformation of it. You must belong nowhere to be able to be anywhere, and with it to have the magic of transition.

These are the first two paragraphs in the book of men, and within them is contained the entirety of human mysticism and more than a small share of human nature.

A more cynical view of humanity would be difficult to find. Many of us are philosophers who are magicians, and we are not a stranger to the speculations of the idle on the nature of mankind. We have read our Voltaire, our Nieztche, our Socra-pla-tle—the hoary joke that all three philosophers were basically the same man in three togas—and many have gone on to read our Confucius, and to dabble in the satires of Pope and the multifaceted gods of the Hindu, recognizing that their methods may have a messiness that is inherently anathema to us, their insights are often valuable.

Indeed, some of us speculate that the very messiness and inherent subjectivity of their methods is what yields that insight, and that at the end of our years of rigor, we produce very little that they did not produce themselves, given an exceptional individual.

This is a statement of heresy that is quite liable to get you removed from the academy, and students to whom it occurs are encouraged to shut up before someone official notices them and hexes them in a more permanent fashion than the hexes which tear from our souls the magic of home.

It is a terrifying threat, and more than sufficient to cow even the most stubborn student, though the first few years of the academy make very sure that such insolence is rarer than rare.

No one knows what draws students to the academy—some are found, some are sought after, some drift into it, and some show up on the grounds of the academy with the same dreamy expression and blank eyes. Swapping stories about how it is we came to the academy is forbidden by practice and by custom. No one walks onto these grounds but is walking out of a life on fire, and it is not uncommon for the students stumbling onto to campus to have been some days since a bath and even more since they’d eaten.

Not that the academy feeds them or encourages hygiene. Quite the opposite, actually. One of the first chores many of us have to learn is to stop grooming and to sleep with our hands curled around a weapon.

New students may be identified by their shocked expressions and minor injuries. Instructors are quite serious about breaking us of the magic of place, and the first step in that brutal process is peeling all the cling film away from our ideas about safety and what cannot happen to us.

And when we no longer act like the magicians of place, and when we no longer bear the multitude of mannerisms and appearance that belonging to a place give us, they begin the real instruction.

As you can probably guess, our real lessons are designed to break us.


End file.
